Unmanned, aerial vehicles have found growing uses in storage facilities for survey and control tasks such as inspection of facility content, inspection of the storage building itself or surveillance operations.
In the present description, the term “storage facility” is understood as an area, which can be an indoor or outdoor area, intended for the storage of products Such a “storage facility” is thus, in general, distinguished from a store, in which products are sold, and a factory, in which products are transformed.
Survey and control tasks involve acquiring some information about an object located at a specific physical location of the facility. These operations where previously mostly done by manual examination. An employee would then travel around the warehouse to record such information.
Unmanned aerial vehicles allows for increasing productivity, improving logistic management and reducing the cost of such tasks. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can easily travel through a storage facility and acquire measurement data giving information about products stored in the facility.
However, the determination of the tridimensional position of an UAV inside a storage facility can be a difficult task.
In addition to the inherent complexity of three-dimensional positioning, storage facilities are usually shared between human and automatic machines and are thus known to be dynamic environments comprising many movable and unpredictable elements (for instance boxes temporary stored in the facility).
Such unpredictable elements strongly complicate three-dimensional positioning of UAV and current solutions mainly involve the use of a human operator to locate and control the unmanned aerial vehicle or the use of additional reference target in the facility to help locate the UAV.
The present invention aims at improving this situation.